There have been a lot of good replies to this question and I just had to weigh in on it myself. I have never heard of eliminating all DCs in design and I am sure it is not being done by anyone else. That said, I am now working for an MSO that chooses not to use internal DCs in their amps but a splitter instead. If the design calls for a DC they will use an external DC at the amp. Go figure! They are also not using anything over a DC-8 in their design but I can't forsee eliminating DCs altogether. Certainly not for the ridiculous reason that your engineer has come up with. Maybe he needs to not think about work so much after he's had a couple of beers. A better solution would be to Pay a little more for some good splicers if you're not willing to train the hacks and QC everyone.
> I just had my Director of Engineering come and inform me that from now on I am no longer supposed to use any DC's in the design I do. His reason was and I quote" I want this done this way because every time I send a splicer out to splice and he comes to a dc, he always splices the cables to the wrong leg on the dc. My question to him was wouldn't it be better to train the splicers how to read a map. He told me that this was becomming more of an industry standard. This is the reason of the shorter cascades. To eliminate the use of dc's. It has nothing to do with bandwith, distortions or any other valid reason. Except to keep his splicers from screwing up.
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> Is this standard procedure with any other companies out there?
